It was less to see the ruins themselves. The layers of ruin are complex because of the long history of the site. After the destruction of the city by the Greeks led by Menaleus, the city was reborn numerous times...in its last incarnation as Ilium, a city favored by the Roman emperor, Augustus. Troy did not die with Priam at the end of the Iliad. It was rebuilt, expanded, favored by Roman emperors and abandoned only some thousands of years after Homer's story ended.
But why go to these ruins? They are really not spectacular in any sense. Just too many layers of history...they count at least nine different cities. But in some way I felt I had connected with Homer's story, with those figures: Aeneas, Ulysses, Hector, Helen, Priam...their all too human strengths and weaknesses...the manner in which they captured for much of the world a sense of tragedy and frailty and personal courage.
I tried to speculate on why people (Turks, Russians, Chinese, Germans, Japanese) were there. Part of a tour package? People seemed bored by the complexity of the ruins, by the guides' talks. People only seemed happy when they were running up and down the stairs to get into the belly of the "replica" of the Trojan horse which Ulysses had thought up for getting into the city.
Perhaps it is simply part of the process of theme-parking history when it gets messy and complicated.
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Location:Bozcaada, Canaakkale, Turkey
